March to 1600

Primaries:

The difference could not have been more stark. During the primaries, it felt like the two parties were preparing for two different elections. While the Democratic side was all about idealism, the Republican side was raucous with protectionism. The Democrat train was almost derailed by the Sanders candidacy, who tried his best pulling his party hard left, and his Republican flame throwing counterpart, Trump, succeeded at lighting a pyre to the Republican establishment. It was all policy posturing on the left and it is....well, it is hard to put in a single word, what was it that was fought on on the right. Clinton was all but anointed to represent the left a couple of years ago. The establishment was with her, the administration sided by her, she had enough sympathy from losing to a history-making candidate in the previous election cycle and now it was her turn to make history. A woman to break the glass ceiling following a black man who broke all barriers, the idea was just too romantic to be true. There was a certain sense of inevitability and entitlement to her candidacy...until Bernie Sanders came in and threw a spanner in her plans. And then the blood letting started...

Clinton wasn't taken down in one single blunt blow to the head, she was bled in a thousand small cuts. As an establishment candidate who has been in the public eye and public service for more than three decades, there was a lot of explaining to do for her, her positions, her policies, her speeches, her emails, her missteps, her mistakes, her deeply enmeshed ties with the monied parties and Bernie dug his daggers deep into each of those and twisted them with some glee to see her writhe, wince and wriggle in discomfort and pain. That is always the bane of confronting idealism, that no amount of pragmatism can overcome the romanticism of idealism. As someone who has seen administration up close and personal, she could not and would not take a position that is so far left that it would be hard to drum up support and excitement from the rest of the country, once she ascended the top chair. So when Bernie accused her to be in cahoots with Wall Street, she had to take it up the chin and not retort, knowing all too well that no President can alienate or run against the financial backbone of the country risking another global meltdown. When Sanders threw at her that she is a seasoned politician, implying her positions changed like a weather wane, she had to nod in rueful agreement and keep mum, for she knew a politician could not have her feet cast in lead and that positions needed to be changed, should the situation demanded. In effect, Sanders was waging a war on establishment calling for a complete razing down of the deeply entrenched institutions employing the glorious idealism and rebuilding everything from ground up all over again, in a fashion that is humane, inclusive, considerate and just. Clinton survived the Bernie blitzkrieg, but only barely...

The Republican primaries were just a circus show rolling into one town after another, delighting the crowds with the much needed escapist entertainment. It had drama, it had conflict, it had laughs, it had yucks, it had it all. While the left simmered and sizzled with positions and policies, the right regaled in abuses, threats, put downs, insults, and sometimes all from the same person. The Tea Party, which was founded on the position of "Take My Country Back", rallied around Trump who had a similar slogan, "Make America Great Again". In hindsight, Trump's campaign was built entirely around his persona, and not on any (implementable) position. And his persona of making sweeping statements, taking brash positions, the cease & desist attitude more than accounted for any real substance in his shaky stances. "We will build a wall and Mexico will pay for it", "Absolutely zero immigration from Muslim countries", "Some sort of punishment for mothers aborting their fetuses", "Every bilateral trade agreement will be reviewed", "All the manufacturing jobs will be brought back" the list goes on. Populism doesn't get any better. For a country that has lost most of its middle and lower middle class to globalization, these hard words and stiff sentences offered the much needed succor and consequently the crowds swelled at his rallies, cheering and echoing his bluster at every step and word. In a world that is increasingly becoming protectionist, with corporations no longer offering any safety nets to the working class and moving their bases to where ever the money and labor are cheap, and the governments bending over backwards to accommodate these same corporations for want of better numbers (the GDPs, the inflationary pressures, the general economic well being), the lower rung of the society became increasingly vocal, virulent and at times, violent, guarding their turf with renewed vigor, be it against immigration, job flight, rising costs and the like. And Trump words caulked these cracks with enough causticity, that they simply overlooked the glaring deficiencies in his words and obvious inefficiencies of his positions. The Republican establishment simply had no answer to (rather it was shell shocked by) Trump's message, or lack thereof. He vanquished his opponents with the ease of an expert marksman shooting up sitting ducks. And his stint as a reality TV superstar certainly didn't hurt coming up with corny put downs characterizing his opponents (Lil' Marco, Lyin' Ted, Crooked Hillary, Low Energy Jeb).

And thus the stage was set for the final push between a jaded battle weary candidate and hungry battle ready one.

General Election:

Save Nixon, who came back from a presidential election loss to winning one again a few years later, there is no other candidate in recent history to mount a successful campaign to the office of Presidency after tasting a bitter loss in the previous editions. And that is for a reason. The public and the establishment are usually tired of the same candidate regurgitating the same message or defending the same positions that never met with approval in the first place. But here is Clinton, who was made to witness her dirty linen laundered in public for the third time in a row (first, with Obama, second, with Bernie and third with Trump) - her husband's infidelities, the ever swirling conspiracy theories, her paid speeches, her proximity to the moneyed class, and this time, with an additional load of the most stupid mistake that anyone with access to confidential information can commit, and that is to compromise the confidentiality. It is reasonable to say that this laxity of hers, stemming from her simple reluctance to using an official mobile phone in addition to her personal one and insisting on accessing the official, confidential and personal communication all on one single unsecured machine, eventually sunk her campaign, not allowing her to focus on her policies and instead forcing her to spend most of the time defending this indefensible move. At worst, it was a stupid mistake, and at best, an oversight that could be chalked against her tech phobia in her advancing age. An immediate and a penitent admittance of the mistake, when pointed it out, might have blown over the unwanted controversy, and she took the road less traveled, one of dodging, playing down and brushing off of it, until it blind sided her by turning into a character flaw - a flaw of utter disregard to established rules, procedures and protocols, a flaw of lack of concern to the security of fellow citizens, (lest those confidential emails been hacked by a trigger-happy hacker and paraded on the internet), and worst of all, a flaw of assuming the standard 'Clinton cover-up' position at the slightest hint of danger. That is right, at the end of it all, it is a mobile phone that ultimately sealed her chance from becoming the first woman head of the free world. On the other hand....

He boasted of grabbing beautiful females by their genitalia, bragged about forcing himself upon them regardless of their wishes, insulted them, rated them, derided them at every given opportunity. He ran a few businesses to the ground, exploited every known loophole in the tax code, refused to release his tax returns, declared bankruptcies quite a few times, and to top it all, called himself a successful businessman who promised to run the country like how he ran his businesses. He labeled and looked down upon almost every other group that constituted a minority, threatened to cleanse his country from all the unwanted elements, incited foreign hacker groups by siccing them on his opponent's campaign, fibbed and flubbed his way through the presidential debates...That he won in spite of all these is a reflection of the mood and mindset of the voter class who wanted to blow up the establishment, figuratively speaking, and usher in a fresher way of doing things, because in Trump's own words, "what do you have to lose" anyway. This Presidential election is not a reflection on Trump's ability or Clinton's capability of running the country. This is a finest expression of anarchy in the modest of terms. If a candidate's appeal has endured beyond his own misogyny, racism, xenophobia, arrogance, and ignorance, that is the voter's way of telling the candidates, 'hey, it's not you, it's me'. Elections are usually a comment on the past and the present, and ironically, very little on the future, however much the candidates tout themselves as the true torch bearers into time. Bill Clinton begot George W with his infidelity and George W paved the way for Obama with his general incompetency. And that is why it is truly surprising that a country that was returning to normal under Obama, domestically and abroad, economically and diplomatically, bequeathed the post to Trump, who is antithetical (at least, in the campaign) to everything that was decent, diplomatic, logical and intelligent, the way Obama administered the nation. This however cannot be held against Obama's tenure, instead it is one of those "acts of God", "vagaries of nature", "aberrations of democracy", that given the right (or wrong) circumstances, any candidate can be swooped up to the top throne, not because of his/her greatness, but despite his/her inadequacies. It so happened that Clinton found herself in the path of yet another historical tornado of a campaign (this time for all wrong reasons), finding herself coming up short yet again. And so it came to be, in 2016, in the battle between the bore and the boor, the people spoke for the latter. Viva Democracy!